Lyrics: Advanced Music Theory & Songwriting

Series Summary

Some call it an art and others a science but most agree that music is an organized set of sounds and rests between sounds. No one knows how long it has existed but the earliest record of written music dates back four thousand years to Ur; however, there exists in Iran five thousand year old figurines holding musical instruments. Given so much human experience with music there exists a considerable amount of musical theory analyzing the different characteristics of music.

Learn music theory and learn to write songs from music instructor Mark W. Black, owner & founder of "Promethean Studios" Dallas, as he teaches advanced topics of music theory and songwriting for beginners in this free video series. Mark covers such topics as: lyrics, rhyming, mood and consistency, melody, step back, tension and resolution in a melody, consonants and movement, combining harmony with lyrics, chords and emotions, how chords effect the mood, chord usage, language of chords, normative chords, non-normative chords, secondary motion, altered and borrowed chords, and secondary motion with altered and borrowed chords.

Video Transcript

" Hey! I am Mark Black and welcome to expertvillage.com and we are going to be talking about advanced theory in song writing. Okay, so we talked about in our basic song writing the three primary parts are lyrics, melody and harmony. Now again we are talking about song writing not composition. It is not that that you cannot write an instrumental assisted classical composition and those kinds of things do not will involve other things. So first we talk about the lyrics. We talked about that lyrics have to succeed as a poem. That does not mean that it have to be beautiful. It just means that you need to look at it as being successful without the music to drive it and you need to think in terms of what is the purpose. Is this supposed to be a love song then it should sound like that, is this suppose to be an odd unusual thing then the words will need to reflect that be odd and unusual. Lots of people, like for example Tory Amos or James Taylor write songs that are great songs, but then you read the lyrics and you get a feeling rather than knowing exactly what is going on. James Taylor’s dark sun and lake, last night I think I might have heard the highway calling, geese and flight, dogs that bite; what does that mean? I do not know exactly what that means, but it gives you a picture of a guy is out, he is walking, you know he is experiencing stuff and so it is not a direct. You know I believe I should leave and go you know on an extended hike. Yes, you know that will be a more direct way of saying it, but you need to look at your lyrics telling the story or being hidden and veiled. You need to consider them from that standpoint though. "